Auteur : Varlan Shalamovla langue : enÉditeur: Penguin UKDate de sortie : 1994-07-28
It is estimated that some three million people died in the Soviet forced-labour camps of Kolyma, in the northeastern area of Siberia. Shalamov himself spent seventeen years there, and in these stories he vividly captures the lives of ordinary people caught up in terrible circumstances, whose hopes and plans extended to further than a few hours This new enlarged edition combines two collections previously published in the United States as Kolyma Tales and Graphite.

Auteur : Varlan Shalanovla langue : enÉditeur: ePenguinDate de sortie : 1994-07-28
It is estimated that some three million people died in the Soviet forced-labour camps of Kolyma, in the northeastern area of Siberia. Shalamov himself spent seventeen years there, and in these stories he vividly captures the lives of ordinary people caught up in terrible circumstances, whose hopes and plans extended to further than a few hours This new enlarged edition combines two collections previously published in the United States as Kolyma Tales and Graphite.

Auteur : Nathaniel Goldenla langue : enÉditeur: RodopiDate de sortie : 2004
This book analyses eleven of Varlam Shalamov's Kolyma Tales from a neo-Formalist perspective. The tales are a testament to Shalamov's seventeen years in Stalin's Gulags, and were written in an attempt to draw attention to this period in Soviet history. Nathaniel Golden has primarily utilised L. M. O'Toole's work Structure, Style and Interpretation in the Russian Short Storyas the major basis for analysis, but has incorporated many other Formalist and indeed Structuralist methods. The tales in each chapter are analysed by means of five major Formalist categories: Narrative Structure, Point of View, Fabula and Sujet, Characterisation and Setting. This process highlights many of Shalamov's ideas and motifs in the tales. He frequently uses techniques of estrangement and paradox to augment camp experience, reflecting his belief that there is no moral, emotional or spiritual gain in suffering. He habitually employs a 'focaliser' to tell the tale from a near-death perspective and in consequence distances the author from events. His literary background is prominent within the tales, where he occasionally alludes to earlier Russian authors and their works to indicate the recurring nature of Man's fallibility against the Gulag background. His characters are often simply portrayed yet representative of flawed heroes and the baseness of human beings subjected to an existencein extremis. His settings are minimal, yet form a major part of his message: Man is compared to nature, but nature is powerful and able to regenerate itself, whereas Man's existence is temporary and futile. This book therefore, shows that the Formalist approach is indeed still valid as a literary tool of analysis as well as showing that upon the 50th year of Stalin's death, Varlam Shalamov's time has arrived.

Auteur : Varlam Shalamovla langue : enÉditeur: New York Review of BooksDate de sortie : 2018-04-10
Life in a Russian gulag, based on the author's own years in the Gulag, chronicled in an epic masterpiece. A masterpiece of Gulag literature, the complete Kolyma Stories is a thousand-page epic composed of short fictional tales based on Russian writer Varlam Shalamov's fifteen years in the Gulag. He spent six years as a slave in the gold mines of Kolyma, a far northeast region of the USSR and one of the coldest and most inhospitable places on earth, before finding a less intolerable life as a paramedic in the prison camps. He began writing his six-volume prose account of life in Kolyma after Stalin's death in 1953 and continued until his own physical and mental decline in the late 1970s. Kolyma Stories comprises the first three volumes of Shalamov's tales. The line between autobiography and fiction is indistinct: everything in these stories was experienced or witnessed by Shalamov. His work records the real names of prisoners and their oppressors; he himself appears simply as "I" or "Shalamov," or at times, under a pseudonym, such as Andreyev or Krist. These collected stories form the biography of a rare survivor, a historical record of the Gulag, and, because the stories have more than documentary value, a literary work of creative power and conviction.